Dragon Age Dungeons and Character Creator screens

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today I’ve got a couple of screenshots of the character creator (direct link to the exe) in action, and one of the new Bioware Social Site. Specifically, the Social Site image is from my character page, so feel free to shoot me off a friend invite! Those are two of my ‘standard’ character names, by the way. Gillain is from an old, old BBS text-based RPG I used to be a part of, and Mimi is the name of one of our guinea pigs. 🙂

Also, several full-sized screenshots of game play taken from inside a dungeon. No, I haven’t played the game; these were provided by Bioware PR. But the shots give you some idea of what the game will look like from various zoom levels.

Enjoy!

Super quick look at Brutal Legend

Posted on by Nimgimli

So the hype for Brutal Legend was kind of off the charts running up to release, but suspiciously enough, there was a review embargo up right until launch day. That’s generally a bad sign.

And now that the embargo is lifted, reviews seem kind of mixed. Tom Chick at Fidgit loves the game, whereas Ars says it is “more opening band than headliner.” The metacritic score is hovering around 84 last time I looked, which is good, not great.

Everyone seems to think the voice talent is great and the theme of the game is a lot of fun, but where opinions diverge is in the actual gameplay and polish. I got the game yesterday and put in a couple of hours and thought I’d just share my very early experience. I opted for the Xbox 360 version since I knew Uncharted 2 was going to live in the PS3 for the next few weeks (and I’m too lazy to get up and switch disks)!

So let’s get the bad stuff out of the way. The game locked up tight on me once; I had to power down the Xbox manually — the controller had become unresponsive. This was early in the game, during the same content we played through in the demo. It only happened once, but it was still cause for concern. My only other real gripe is that the special moves that include another character seem finicky as heck. I just can’t seem to pull them off reliably and since they’re a 1 button press move, that shouldn’t be the case. I’ll also agree with Ars that, at least early in the game, friendlies and enemies look very similar, particularly in a big melee. Happily Clementine (protagonist Eddie Rigg’s guitar and ranged weapon) will happily auto-target bad guys for you.

Now some of the good stuff. I’ll join in on the love fest around the voice talent and the heavy metal theme. The music is awesome, of course, and even though I knew it was coming I still grinned ear-to-ear the first time Ozzie Osborne manifested in front of me and started a mumbling tirade. Very funny stuff. The world is weird and wonderful, too. Just roaming around finding things is a lot of fun. The hint system is brilliant, done via audio snippets of Eddie ‘thinking to himself.’ In fact at first you’ll think a hint is just random banter but the longer you remain stumped by something, the more explicitly hint-like this banter becomes, until Eddie just flat-out tells you what you need to do. It’s a nice system to keep things rolling along.

After a couple of hours playing I had to stop for the night and I was a bit disappointed to see my game was 14% complete already, so it seems the storyline isn’t very long. I’m told you can keep playing/collecting past the end of the main mission sequence. There’s also a multiplayer mode that I haven’t tried yet (I’ve heard it can spoil the plotline of the single player campaign so I’m going to hold off…multiplayer isn’t generally my thing anyway).

So my very early feeling is that this is a good game. I don’t think it’ll end up being Game of the Year material or anything like that. I’m glad I picked it up, but I’m equally glad that Amazon was giving a $10 gift coupon with the pre-order. $50 feels like a better price for this game than $60 does and probably it’s rental material. Put it this way, I’m looking forward to playing more tonight, but it isn’t the kind of game I can’t get out of my head.

I’ll check back in after I’ve got 8-10 hours in and report how things are going then.

Dragon Age Character Creator released, and a word about gameplay

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today Bioware released the Character Creator from Dragon Age: Origins. You can download it by following one of the links listed in this Bioware blog post. If you install it, create a character and then upload it to Bioware’s social site (which also launched today), you’ll get an in-game bonus, the Lucky Stone, when the game releases:

This old stone, set in a golden ring, has been an aid and companion to dozens of adventurers across innumerable years. Its trip to Ferelden was long and convoluted. Some say it has a life of its own.
Stats:
~ Adds +1 to all all stats.

Next order of business: gameplay. I had an interesting discussion on Twitter today, and someone pointed out to me that while Bioware has released a ton of trailers from the game, there’s been very little gameplay shown.

Well, Giant Bomb has a lengthy Quick Look that shows gameplay, which I’ll embed below. The reason I want to do this is that I’m discovering that some people are anticipating a different kind of game from what Bioware is delivering. They’ve promised a “spiritual sequel to Baldur’s Gate” and that’s the kind of game it is, and we’re talking about the PC games, not the console versions done by Snowblind Studios (which were action-rpgs). Dragon Age: Origins gameplay is going to be all about real-time RPG combat with the option to pause any time to adjust the actions of your party of characters. This isn’t an action game and you don’t have direct control over the characters to the point of, say, hitting a button to swing a sword. This is old school RPG gaming.

I just don’t want anyone being unhappily surprised on launch day. I’m super-excited to re-visit this style of gaming; it’s been quite a while since a major developers has done anything like this. But it won’t be for everyone.

Anyway, here’s the Quick Look. Do keep in mind that the Giant Bomb dudes goof on Dave, who is running this demo, because he is, as they call him, a Pauser (meaning he likes to pause the game a lot). You can play a bit more fluidly than he does, if you’d prefer. Or at least, I’m assuming you can because you could in the old games.

Dragon Age: Origins — Sacred Ashes Trailer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another Monday, another bite-sized morsel of Dragon Age goodness. This week we get a *beautifully* rendered cut-scene showing a band of warriors (Grey Wardens, I’d wager) encountering a gaggle of Darkspawn in a frozen mountain pass. This is (obviously) just a canned scene and so won’t have any direct impact on the game, but it sure does set the mood. Once upon a time Blizzard was known for doing some of the best cut-scenes in the industry. Looks like Bioware is looking to challenge Blizzard in the cut-scene arena!

At the start of the video, the leader of the party mentions a tomb, and one of the others says something about freezing to death while searching for the bones of a mad-woman. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they’re searching for the tomb of Andraste The Prophet. She wrote the Chant of Light, from which the Chantry sprang (the Chantry being the major religion of Fereldran.

[My ramblings on the mythos of Dragon Age comes in part from reading the novels, in part from looking up things on the Dragon Age wiki, and a smidgen from press materials. Take everything I write with a grain of salt, as I’m no Dragon Age scholar!]

The Hunt for a Bow (Demon’s Souls – PS3)

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been playing a lot of Demon’s Souls but I feel oddly hesitant to blog about it. It’s a fantastic game that doesn’t translate well into spoken words and I fear that trying to describe it will put people off it.

But I’m going to tell you a story. Every time I start playing I have to decide what my goal will be for this session. Do I want to explore a new section of the world? Do I want to try to advance my character level? Do I want to buy a new spell? Gather materials to update a weapon? Or just get a new weapon? So many ways to improve a character.

In the first world lives a red dragon. This dragon is a real pain in the backside. There’s no way I can melee it at this point and my crossbow is too limited to fight it safely. But with a bow, you can do “precise aiming” and snipe things from afar. One problem. Drake Chaser the Soldier doesn’t own a bow. I decide the time has come for him to get one.

First thing I do is search online to find out where a bow can be had. That’s in some ways a downside to Demon’s Souls — you’ll almost certainly find yourself searching outside the game for certain nuggets of information. Turns out there’s a bow at the top of the second guard tower along a parapet extending from the area of the castle you ‘zone into’. So off I go.

But that damned dragon watches the parapet and does straffing runs along it. How to get past the beastie in one piece?

First step: get to the parapet. I have to cross a room filled with Hoplites. These look like giant black slimes holding a sword and shield. There was a time when they left me quaking in my boots, but now dispatching them comes easily. I block or dodge their spear attack, then run behind them and impale them. Turns out they’re quite squishy from the back. Or I could use fire on them, but no sense in using up my Turpentine supplies (turp adds a temporary fire effect to a weapon). I dispatch the hoplites, in the process earning some stones used in weapon upgrading. Bonus!

Finally I get to the parapet. The first time I ran out onto this, the dragon swooped down and fried me to a crisp, sending my back to the warp-in point sans all the souls I’d gathered. But I learned. I creep out onto the parapet until I hear the cry of the dragon, then jump back. If flies over me, covering the parapet with flames. I spring after it, knowing my stamina (sprinting uses stamina) will run out just as I get to the first tower. It does and I make it to safety just as the dragon makes another pass. I look back to see the wall of flame peter out mere feet from where I stand.

OK so I’m at Tower 1. This is as far as I’ve ever been. The stretch to Tower 2 is much longer and worse, there are plenty of enemies stationed along it, many behind barricades. I creep out of the shadows of the tower and the first enemy sees me. It attacks. I dodge backwards, then step forward and give it a hard attack with my spear as it tried to recover from its wild swing. I follow the strong attack with a quick jab and it’s down. I’ve faced this kind of foe before. I move farther out and hear the cry of the dragon. I duck back to see what happens, and sure enough it strafes this section of the parapet. Where once there were enemies and barricades, now there are corpses and splintered wood. Bonus? For some reason I get all the souls from the baddies the dragon killed.

But still, how to get to Tower 2? Growing impatient and careless, I start running along the parapet. The dragon attacks, my health drops precipitously. With a sliver left, I run back to the safety of the first tower. Eat some herbs to heal up. I decide to climb to the top of this tower to see what I can see, and when I do I notice stairs going down as well as up. What’s this? I follow and they lead to a tunnel running under the parapet from tower 1 to tower 2. I’m thinking “this is too easy” when a pack of wild dogs attacks. These things are hard for me for some reason. They tend to leap and circle behind me, making them tough to hit, particularly since I’m holding a spear and the tunnel is narrow. Hard to spin around with so unwieldy a weapon.

Once again I’m almost dead as the last dog finally perishes. More herbs, and I press on. There are plenty of other enemies along the way. Someone has left a message by a gaping hole in the wall. I stop to read it. It says “Nice view” (which it is). As I’m reading it, another dog attacks. Dammit. I fight him off, then backtrack and add my own message: “Beware of distractions.”

I finally made it to tower two, scrambled up and dispatched the few enemies at the top of it, and sure enough, found the bow! But now I’m feeling greedy and I want to know what’s in Tower 3.

There’s no tunnel: I checked. And again the dragon is strafing the parapet. Again it sweeps off the enemies for me. I run, listening for the sound of the beast. As it approaches, I tumble forward. Tumbling is a way to avoid attacks: while tumbling you’re invulnerable. I time it perfectly, the dragon’s flame washes over my harmlessly and I bob back to my feet and keep running. I’m so focused on listening for the dragon that I’m not really looking at what’s in front of me. Turns out right inside Tower 3 is a group of crossbowmen and a couple of knights.

Suddenly I look like a pincushion and my health is about half gone. I attack, skewering the crossbowmen, who go down fairly easily, but now I have the knights to deal with. I’d like to back up, but I fear the dragon behind me. I panic, try eating herbs but one of the knights rushes me (you’re totally vulnerable for a few seconds when eating a healing herb). Foolishly I back up, try again. The other knight rushes me. Almost dead now, I start to block and attack. The knights have shields and my spear held 1 handed has a devil of a time breaking through shield defenses. I should be fighting these guys with a sword held in 2 hands, using my strength to break through their defense. But I don’t have time to switch so my only chance is to get behind them.

I try to do that, circling and jabbing. Had there been one of them I’d be all right. Now my back is to the third tower…and I have no clue what is behind me. I’m afraid to back up. I’m trying to block. Blows rain down on my shield, draining my stamina. I stab futilely, but it’s too late. My stamina runs out, I drop my shield, and one of the knights delivers the Killing Blow.

YOU DIED fills the screen. And I’m back at the spawn in point with zero souls. The only way to recover what I’ve dropped? Go back out there, get past those knights and click on the bloodstain that is all that is left of my prior life. But the Hoplites are back. The wild dogs are back. The enemies on the parapets are back.

On the plus side, I still have the bow I went for! You don’t lose items when you die.

I’ll stop this story now and pretend I went back to the Nexus to rest. In truth I tried to get those souls back, but the 2nd time I didn’t time my tumble right and the dragon fried me on the parapet, killing me again, leaving a new bloodstain and erasing the first one, and all the souls connected to it.

Hopefully this tale illustrates some of what is great about Demon’s Souls. It’s a game that rewards patience, planning and skill. Had I followed my original game plan, I would’ve been fine. I got greedy and paid the price, and paying the price is why people say Demon’s Souls is so hard and unforgiving. There is a penalty for dying.

The proper course of action, I think, would’ve been to recover the bow, head back to stock up on arrows, and then kill the dragon, allowing me to cross to the next tower carefully, able to scope out what’s going on rather than running blindly across and depending on a very skilled (or very lucky) tumble to avoid the dragon’s breath.

That’s what I’ll try tonight except…turns out I don’t have enough strength to use the bow effectively! So first I’ll wipe out bunches of enemies and use the souls to increase my strength. Or maybe rather than killing the dragon I should learn a spell that protects me from flame. Hmm. I’ve heard there’s a ring somewhere that does the same thing. Maybe I should look for that? Decisions, decisions.

No matter what I decide to do, I know I’ll have fun. This is a great game!

An Intro to the Grey Wardens (Dragon Age: Origins)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins posts. There’re two reasons for that. First & foremost, I’m very excited about the game. And second, Bioware’s PR has seen fit to provide Dragonchasers with an on-going stream of press materials.

In Dragon Age: Origins, your character is a Grey Warden. So who are these guys and girls?

The Grey Wardon is a military organization dedicated to fighting the Darkspawn. They have no allegiance to country or kin: they’re feared by many, due to their independence and military prowess. Their only purpose is to fight the Darkspawn and many people don’t even believe Darkspawn are real.

Maybe I should back up. The Darkspawn are a race of corrupt, basically humanoid people living underground. Their warrens are filled with fungus-like growths and weird hanging flesh sacs. They’re filled with a smell like rotting meat. The skin of the Darkspawn is described as rotting or tumescent, but they have sharp fangs and talons. Their bite is toxic and anyone bitten will either die from the poison or turn into an insane, ghoulish creature. There are various ‘classes’ of Darkspawn. Think, y’know, orc-kind, where you have goblins and orcs and cave trolls.

The Darkspawn are driven to search for The Old Gods: ancient dragons sleeping in lairs beneath the earth. When they find one, they infect the dragon with their corruption. Eventually the dragon wakens and bursts forth from its lair. The Darkspawn then follow it to the surface and set about trying to kill every living thing they can find. This event is known as a Blight, and they happen infrequently enough that memory of them fades into legend.

The Grey Wardens remain ever vigilant in the centuries between Blights, fighting skirmishes with the Darkspawn during their infrequent smaller raids on the surface. The Wardens can detect the Darkspawn and vice versa, because to become a Grey Warden you have to drink the blood of a Darkspawn (many candidates die from this), thus taking their taint inside yourself.

If a Grey Warden lives long enough, he or she will start to lose the battle against the corruption living inside them. When that happens, they undertake a ritual known as The Calling, in which they enter the warrens of the Darkspawn one last time, alone, with their intent being to kill as many of the foul beings as possible before dying in battle. Before this journey they, along with their close friends, feast among the dwarves who also live underground. The morning after the feast, the dwarves open the massive portals that lead to the Deep Roads where the Darkspawn now dwell, and the Warden enters alone. The portal is re-sealed, leaving the Warden to his or her fate.

Convenience vs Immersion

Posted on by Nimgimli

By the standards we use to judge games today, Ultima Online, at launch, was a terrible game full of down time and grinding. Let me give you a recap in case you never played it. The land of Sosaria was mostly wilderness when the game launched. There were a handful of cities with guards that offered limited protection (they either had to observe a crime or ‘hear’ you call for help before they’d intercede), but otherwise it was a brutal place to live. Not only was it an open PVP world, but there were thieves who could pluck items out of your pack. When you died, all your belongings stayed on your corpse, available to anyone not above plundering the dead.

Travel? Initially you walked everywhere, dreaming about having a horse. Getting a horse was a matter of either buying one from another player, or spending a lot of time learning to tame animals (first birds and bunnies, then perhaps dogs and cats, and finally horses) and then training it to be ridable. When you finally got a horse, you’d have to keep it fed and treat it well. A mis-treated animal might escape and return to its wild roots. Assuming you did all that correctly you’d have a trusty steed…until some malice-filled cretin decided to kill it on you.

There was also limited teleportion. You’d have to make or buy a rune and then use it to mark a location, after which you could teleport to that location, assuming you had the required reagents. Those were gathered from the wilderness, either by you or another player.

There were some NPC merchants that sold some very basic items, but their stock was limited. These NPCs would buy items from players as well…assuming they needed what the player had to offer. As an NPC’s stock levels rose, they’d offer less and less for that item until finally they’d just stop buying altogether (one conceit to gameplay…every so often NPC stock would ‘reset’ to get rid of excess materials).

What few ‘quests’ existed were found by talking to various NPCs. These didn’t have an ! on top of their head; you had to find them. Crafting meant tedious gathering of materials and working at a forge or a spinning wheel or whatever tool you needed. Gaining skills meant spending a lot of time in front of a training dummy, or beating up lesser creatures. How’d you know it was a lesser creature? Either by common sense (a rat or a bunny) or by trial and error. There was no ‘con’ system to tell you such & such a creature was 1 level below, or 3 levels above, you. (Heck, there were no levels!)

In short, if Ultima Online version 1.0 launched today it would be ripped to shreds by most gamers and reviewers. And you know what? It was a glorious game. The one game that was so compelling that I truly did get ‘addicted’ to it. I missed work because of that game. Lost sleep. It almost destroyed my relationship. These are not things I’m proud to admit, but I share them just to illustrate how compelling the game was.

Today’s games are kinder, gentler beasts. We have fast travel, and clearly marked quests, and death penalties that don’t even feel like penalties. Why? Because that’s what players say they want. We complain if we have to spend more than a few minutes traversing the world to meet up with friends. We complain if we lose progress. We complain if we have to repeat the same actions multiple times, calling the game a grindfest.

And the developers hear us and they adjust their designs to give us what we want.

And the more the devs do this, the more I hear about RPG ennui. People jump from game to game, looking for something sticky but not finding it. They give up the genre altogether, or resign themselves to retreating to whatever game they have high-level characters (or a bunch of friends) in. Often this retreat is done out of resignation rather than enthusiasm.

Enter Fallen Earth and Demon’s Souls. Now the latter isn’t an MMO, but the point I’m making isn’t limited to MMOs. Both of these games buck the trend of adding convenience to games. Fallen Earth has no fast travel. It doesn’t have an apocalyptic Walmart where you can go and buy anything and everything you need. You have to ‘grind’ a lot in terms of gathering materials to get good enough to make the items you need, or to get enough cash up to buy what you need from other players or the few NPC suppliers out there. It isn’t a complete throwback, mind you. The death penalty is very light, there’s no theft and your transport can’t be killed or stolen.

But a lot of what Fallen Earth does is ‘wrong’ by the standards players demand from modern games. And yet people who try it out tend to stick with it. This shouldn’t be. The game isn’t all that polished, the graphics pale in comparison to something like Aion, the interface is kind of clunky and has to be learned. But the population of the game continues to grow while that of Aion and Champions Online apparently dwindles.

Demon’s Souls should be a flop, too. It’s an RPG with no quests, a relatively stiff death penalty, a ton of grinding, non-consensual PvP and game systems that can only be figured out by trial and error. And yet all the reviews that I’ve read have been glowing, and the community is enthusiastic as hell. The game is compelling and engrossing.

What’s the common theme between Fallen Earth and Demon’s Souls? Immersion. All the convenience factors in modern games make them feel like modern games. The boring stuff, the frustrating stuff…that makes these games feel like immersive worlds. Without pain there can be no pleasure, to go all zen on you. A reward without any struggle just isn’t as sweet (for many of us) as a reward we had to work for.

This doesn’t apply to everyone who plays games. Not in the slightest. But it applies to those of us who still embrace the Role Playing in RPgs. I’m not talking about role playing in the sense of gathering with a few other players and doing a skit. I mean the internal role playing that some of us do. The role playing that lets us use these games as portals to other worlds, the same way a good book can do.

If you don’t know what I mean by that, this post won’t make sense and I’m sure you’ll disagree with it. That’s fine. But if you get what I’m saying…if you know the delight of just sinking into a good virtual world and existing in there for a few hours, then please give Fallen Earth and/or Demon’s Souls a try. Both are excellent ‘throw-back’ games that bring the immersion back to our hobby. Games like this need our support. We need to send a message to game developers that there are still players who appreciate a good immersive game, and who still appreciate a challenge.

Halo ODST Single Player Campaign Review (Xbox 360)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Halo is a unique IP in that it has bridged the gap between two generations of console gaming. The original Halo was primarily a single player game with a compelling narrative that drew players in and helped the game become a huge hit. Then XBox Live arrived, and with it, the beginning of the end of quality single player narrative FPS experiences on the platform. Halo 2 had a decent single player campaign (albeit with a maddening cliff-hanger ending) but its multiplayer component is what drove its success. Halo 3, the first Halo title on the XBox 360, was primarily a multiplayer game with a completely forgettable single player campaign (I’m speaking literally…I can’t even remember what happened in Halo 3).

So now we have Halo ODST, a kind of side-story thrown together in 14 months, using the Halo 3 engine. A game that never would’ve happened if the Peter Jackson Halo project and its accompanying games hadn’t imploded before getting off the ground.

So what does Halo ODST have to offer for those of us who still prefer narrative-driven, single player gaming? Not too much, really. The story revolves around The Rookie, an ODST (it stands for Oribital Drop Ship Trooper) grunt who gets separated from his squad during his first drop. The story takes place in New Mombasa (which, you’ll recall, is pretty much a smoking crater in Halo 3). The goal is basically just to re-unite with your squad. As The Rookie runs around the city, fighting Covenant and scrounging for health packs and ammo, he’ll find items that will cause him to, erm, psychically link to other squad members. I jest, but I don’t really know what the plot device is called here. You target an item…maybe a gun, or a busted turret, or a piece of scorched shielding, and you get transported into the body of one of the other squad members to play through his part of the story.

It’s an interesting way of telling a story…if there was a story to tell. But the plot is so shallow, and all the troopers you control so similar, that it all kind of fizzles. Essentially one member of the jump team, a woman named Dare (voiced by Trisha Helfer of Battlestar Gallactica fame) seems to be working for some black ops group or something. She changes the drop target at the last minute, causing all this chaos. Your squad leader, and Dare’s boy-toy, is Buck (voiced by Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity, and more recently Castle). Buck is trying to find Dare, while the rest of the squad is trying to find each other. And Dare is trying to find something or someone else (avoiding spoilers here).

The actual gameplay is classic Halo stuff. You’re not Master Chief so you don’t have regenerating health or shields, but you do have “stamina” which is essentially a shield, and which regenerates. To restore your health you’ll have to find health packs. New Mombasa must have been a dangerous place even before the covenant since there’s an auto-hospital unit on just about every corner, from which you can get healed up.

So you run around the city, generally following a way point, until you find an item that lets you jump into another squad member’s body, and then you play through his story, then jump back to The Rookie, and repeat. The last 20% of the game or so is all Rookie stuff and just as the story finally starts to at least feel cohesive and directed..it’s over. For the most part you’ll be using weapons taken from the Covenant, and ammo is a constant issue forcing you to swap out a new weapon every few minutes. This is also why jumping into another squad member’s body feels so pointless. Sure, these guys each has a specialty (sniper rifle, heavy weapon, or whatever) but the ammo for their special weapon will quickly run out after which he’ll be scrounging the same Covenant weapons all the other characters wind up using.

Essentially there’s not a thing new here, including the engine, which is either starting to show its age or just always did a crappy job rendering faces (Master Chief never took his helmet off, after all). For the character of Buck they’ve digitally painted Fillion’s face onto the ploygons and it looks creepy as hell. Dare’s character is equally creepy though not a map of Helfer’s face. This is the ugliest you’ll ever see Ms. Helfer.

The voice work is good, and the team let Buck be Fillion — if you’re a fan of Nathan Fillion you’ll know what I mean. He even works a “Bam, said the lady!” into his voice work. Firefly fans might also recognize Alan Tudyk & Adam Baldwin (Wash & Jayne, respectively) voicing Mickey & Dutch.

So we have great voice talent…but they just don’t have a story to tell us, really. Such a shame.

The one bright spot in the campaign is the story of Sadie, a woman trying to get into New Mombasa while everyone else is trying to get out. We never meet Sadie face-to-face. Instead her story is told via “audio drops” that The Rookie gets from pay phones as he runs around New Mombasa. Sadie’s father created The Superintendent — the AI construct that controls New Mombasa. For reasons unclear to me, Sadie wants to get back to The Superintendent.

I’m sad to say, I didn’t find all the drops, so I don’t know how Sadie’s story ends. That’s the one incentive I have for going back to replay the game. If the main story had been as intriguing as this hidden audio tale, Halo ODST would’ve been a much stronger title. BTW, VentureBeat has a great article up on how this story came about — well worth a read.

Bottom line, if you’re like me and love strong narrative in your single player games…don’t buy Halo ODST. If you’re a Halo junkie then the game is probably worth renting (it isn’t very long) just so you can say you played it. It might even be worth a rental if you’re a huge Nathan Fillion fan.

At this point, maybe it’s time for Bungie to just make pure multiplayer games and drop the lackluster single-player stuff all together. There’s no way this campaign is worth $60, and Halo 3’s wasn’t, either. Better to skip it than do it half-assed, Bungie. How about doing the right thing for your fans and making Halo: Reach a $40 multiplayer-only title?

Demon’s Souls & its brutal(?) difficulty (PS3)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Demon’s Souls for the PS3 arrived last Tuesday and it’s been the only game I’ve played since. That should tell you something. I wanted to wait until I’d logged 8 hours in the game before writing a post, though, because I thought I was missing something.

You see, all the previews, reviews of the Japanese versions and even reviews of the North American version have talked about the brutal difficulty level of the game, and I haven’t found it to be that hard. At least not so far.

I’m no uber gamer, either. Maybe there’s a big difficulty spike later in the game. Or maybe I picked the easiest class (Soldier). I dunno. Maybe I’m just old enough that I remember how hard games used to be. Or maybe my rather methodical style of gaming works well with Demon’s Souls.

Whatever the reason, I’m enjoying the game tremendously. Yes, you have to think. Yes, you have to advance carefully. And sure, you’ll die, but really the death penalty is pretty mild. Upon dying you lose all the souls (souls are currency) you’ve collected and restart the level with all enemies respawned. But you don’t lose your items, or your weapons or armor. Anyone remember Diablo? Dying there meant running back to your body naked if you didn’t have the presence of mind to drop some backup gear in town. That could be hard. And here, if you get back to where you died, you get all your souls back anyway.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s my MMO experience that’s making the game not seem as hard? MMO players are used to respawning enemies. We’re used to ‘pulling’ foes a few at a time when necessary. We’re used to respawning back at some pre-set spot when we die. And we’re used to having to replay areas of a game.

What does add to the challenge is that there’s no ‘bank’ to store your souls in. So when you’re saving up for something that costs 1000’s of souls…yeah, you start to think pretty hard about what would happen if you lost them all. But that’s what makes the game so exciting. You can replay levels/areas over and over again, so you have to make benefit-risk assessments. Should you play it save and replay a lower level area a couple of times? Or push into a difficult area where you’ll earn souls faster but you might lose it all? Hmmm.

Here’s what saves the game: combat is fun and satisfying. So when I say “replay a level” and you start thinking “Ugh, grindfest!” well, you’re wrong. In fact replaying easy levels is both good practice (you can practice some of the tougher moves) and a blast to do. It makes you feel mighty. Parry, riposte! Dodge & back stab. Block, shield smash and rush forward. It’s all incredibly fun. (Of course, if you don’t like the combat, the game is going to be awful for you.)

So now you have a sackful of souls. What are you going to do with them? You can: repair your gear, buy a weapon, upgrade a weapon or armor, buy a new spell, buy a new miracle, or level up your character (1 stat at a time). All progress comes from souls (there’s no concept of experience points here) so again, you have to make smart and sometimes tough choices. And for the most part, souls come from killing things. There aren’t any real quests, nor does anyone want to buy your rat skins or dog livers. Or even your old gear. If you can’t use it, just throw it away.

I guess I’m putting the cart before the horse here, going on and on about why I like the game without really explaining the basics. Now have I talked about the fascinating multiplayer system. The problem is, I can’t wait to get back to playing…so for now you’ll just have to find out the basics from the reviews linked to above!

Dragon Age: Origins – The Broodmother & DLC announcements

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Darkspawn are a subterranean menace in the world of Dragon Age: Origins. At first they were a threat mostly to the dwarves, who (for the most part) spend their entire lives underground. Recently it seems the Darkspawn are starting to plague surface dwellers, too. Maric encountered the Darkspawn in The Stolen Throne and lived to tell the tale, but where do they come from?

Now it seems we know:

No one knows how the Darkspawn truly live in their tainted warrens beneath the earth, although a few Grey Wardens have, on occasion, delved deep into the old Dwarven tunnels in an effort to find the heart of the Darkspawn corruption and scour it clean. Those who ever returned, did so with ashen faces and spoke only of a creature called a “Broodmother” that haunted their dreams for the rest of their short existence. What the Broodmother truly is, only the Grey Wardens know for certain.

Before we get to the trailer (which is not for the squeamish) let’s talk DLC. Bioware and EA are doing their best to fight the used game market: those of us who buy the game new will get a code The Stone Prisoner, a DLC package which unlocks some quests and adds a new potential party member (a stone golem named Shale) to the game. If you buy a used copy of Dragon Age: Origins, The Stone Prisoner is going to cost you $15.

There’s another package of DLC that’ll be ready on Day 1 called Warden’s Keep. I’ve seen some sources claim this is an XBox exclusive, but my contact at Bioware says it’ll be available for $7 on PSN and PC, and 560 points on XBLA. The Warden’s Keep unlocks Grey Warden Armor, a chest to store your belongings in, and a quest line involved a haunted Grey Warden Keep.

Here’s the trailer for the Brood Mother. The creature is pretty vile, and the amount of blood spatter in this clip is way over the top. Make sure the kids aren’t looking over your shoulder when you view this one. A couple of stills follow the clip. This thing is nasty!!

What's a mother to do??

We're going to need some Oxy-Clean after this fight...